Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Even the Workhouses Temp Out

(Ed: Some comments are too good or revealing to bury in the comment section where a handful of people at most will see it. Some deserve a wider arena. This was a comment I just posted in response to a post at D r i f t g l a s s's site.)

As an unflinching liberal, it's incumbent on me to tell others and myself, "You need to read this article." But since it could've been written by me, someone also in his 50's and unemployed for upwards of five years, it's heartbreaking and incredibly discouraging to read this, especially as I don't have DG's professional pedigree or an MIT education.
Two weeks ago tomorrow, I sat at my last interview at a place to which I've applied three or four times since 2009. It's a couple of miles from my house, I have extensive experience in manufacturing. They said it would take them a week to make up their minds. Only five guys responded to their ad and one other consented to an interview. So I got rejected once again only this time I was competing with a very, very short list. And I did everything right, all the way down to the resume they've already seen three times and the nice shirt and tie.
What Drifty could've also said is that companies have two great options: They can either outsource the labor overseas or to right to work states or, if they need homegrown help, they can always hire temps. The temp agency mill is one of the slimiest rackets this side of bestiality porn and payday lenders. More often than not, they lead you on with promises of regular employment, temp to perm, blah blah blah. But there's a catch: Right around the time of 9/11, their clients insisted on getting involved in the vetting process without actually taking the risk of doing any of the hiring.
Now, they have the leisure to look at resumes sent to them by temp agencies and saying, "No" to virtually all of them. Prior to 9/11, there were no interviews. You applied to a temp agency and with a bit of luck you'd get sent straight to the job site. No more. Now their clients get first refusal rights on interviews.
The place to which I'd applied 13 days ago is one of the very few factories in MA that doesn't temp out.
And DG's right: Being unemployed longterm makes you unfit for work. That big, 50+ month-long gap at the end of your resume is in itself a reason for them not to hire you, by their reasoning. And it's real easy, if you're a gainfully-employed hiring manager with an actual career, to look a such gaps as evidence of laziness, unhirability or moral turpitude. And, as Ms. Barrington-Ward points out, if those barriers don't trip you up, a credit check will after years of unemployment has sledgehammered your credit rating.
I never had the slightest confidence that Obama would lead us out of this unemployment mess and I can say with some bitter satisfaction I was right. Mrs. JP and I don't know what will happen to us after the holidays, especially in light of the fact blog readership, hence donations, are drastically down and since we just lost our biggest benefactor.
Meanwhile, unemployment is a reason to not hire. Some asshole state rep in Hawaii is smashing the property of the homeless with a sledgehammer and many major cities have actually made feeding the homeless a criminal offense.
What we're seeing is a carefully, if loosely, coordinated attempt at economic genocide if not outright genocide. We have criminalized indigence, we have criminalized charity and altruism itself yet put the jiggling pusses of robber barons like Lloyd Blankfein on the cover of Forbes as a "captain of industry." These are now our values.
Btw, drifty, unless your commenter above has a sick sense of humor, I think one of your readers is about to commit suicide.